How Raffles Can Strongly Benefit Non Profit Organizations and Increase Revenues by Nicholas Pederson
How Raffles Can Strongly Benefit Non Profit Organizations and Increase Revenues by Nicholas Pederson
I believe that raffles can strongly benefit non-profit organizations and increase revenues. I have personally participated in several raffles that have benefitted myself with a select baseball team that I was playing on.
Our raffle started months in advance with a group of people getting together and coming up with a list to target local businesses for donations of gift cards or products. Golf courses, local amusement parks, bowling alleys, local restaurants, and movie theaters are just a few ideas. These individuals send out letters to their list of businesses to contact, requesting a donation and the non-profit paperwork and explain the raffle fundraising. This can take a few months to send out letters and receive raffle items from each business interested in donating, so it is important to start early with gathering the donations. Another idea is that you can also have the (n this case), baseball players purchase and donate gift cards. You have to purchase a large set of raffle tickets.
Once you have gathered all the items donated for the raffle and have the raffle tickets, package the raffle items nicely in attractive packaging, take photos and set aside a number of minimal tickets per player to sell. Make sure you record those ticket numbers on the raffle tickets for each player if you are offering an incentive for whoever sells the most tickets. Then give each (in this case), baseball players a flier showing a list of all the prizes and the price for each raffle ticket along with their set raffle tickets to sell. Give the players a few weeks to sell the raffle tickets. There will be some players requesting more raffle tickets to sell.
When the deadline is reached for selling tickets, if you are having a incentive for which player sells the most raffle tickets, award it then. Next, you can hold your raffle drawing. Once all the donated items have been awarded a raffle ticket, give the prizes back to the baseball player that sold the item, for them to deliver the prize.
This is a great way to increase revenue to cover expenses for the non-profit. For example, our baseball team was raising money to offset travelling expenses to the Baseball World Series. We did take the amount that each player sold and took that dollar amount raised off of their total expense for the trip. This minimized the out of pocket expenses for each family and also meant that if a player did not participate in the raffle, they did not participate in the money raised. By having awards for first place in the total number of raffle tickets sold, this created internal competition, which also increased sales.
There was very little expense to do this raffle ticket fundraiser. Many companies that we solicited had their contact information available on their website with email addresses for contact names. Our only expenses were to buy raffle tickets and to print each player a flier. It was fun and helped each family participating financially. There are few fundraisers that produce that high of a profit or return, based on the minimal time and money invested to start the fundraiser. It was our most successful fundraiser on the baseball team.
Help Nicholas Pederson's pursuit of a scholarship award by clicking the “sharing is caring” buttons – click on this link:
Contributed by Nicholas Pederson